GOBBO'S CHRISTMAS STORY

Gobbo is an ordinary lad, no better and no worse than anyone else, and in a mess.

“It’s funny,” yawned Gobbo, shivering, “how the whitest flakes of snow look black as coal when you’re shivering in the cold with not much more than an old blanket for warmth.”

They did look black. Not just to him but to everyone looking at them from the perspective of a freezing heart on a frozen world, when there wasn’t a spark of fire anywhere around.

The people with homes had warmth and fires, but Gobbo wasn’t one of those. He told himself as he pulled himself as close to his dusty blanket as he could. But there’s no telling with the world, where a soul might end up through no fault of his own.

He’d been to University, hadn’t he?

And done well. Really well and better than he’d expected. In between the sex, the drugs and the rock ‘n’ roll he’d read the right books, learned the right things and managed to retain in his impressive memory most of it.

The world started to become a tad jaundiced when he left Uni with his certificate and wisdom. He needed work and it seemed that his clever degree didn’t necessarily guarantee that.

But he eventually found a job and worked for his bread after University. He’d worked hard, not doing what his degree meant him to do but what he could find to do.

And his education continued with a taste of ife in a Call Centre.

He had the gift of the gab, could answer most questions without referring too often to the sheet of prepared answers for the most common queries … what do I do when the blue light goes off? It isn’t working any more and I need it right now…

“Then check the fuse in the plug,” he told them off the top of his head and, you know, they rarely phoned back because, he supposed, it had worked. No matter what it was, he could sort most things out with a few intelligent suggestions.

Then, out of the blue, he’d been arrested for a robbery he knew nothing about. It shocked him to the core but as he knew nothing about it he was at a loss for anything other than that to say in his own defence, and when he explained to the court that he knew nothing about it his arguments had been poo-pooed and evidence in the form of the DNA from one of the hairs at the scene had proved that he was there.

It was evidence enough. There had been a lot of robberies lately and they were going to make an example of him. You couldn’t have innocent folks afraid to sleep in their beds at night. Something must be done, and done firmly.

So he was locked up. Behind bars. With other felons, though he wasn’t actually a felon. But nobody believed him because his DNA was there. You can’t dispute with DNA. It was the aphrodisiac of justice.

Mind you, he supposed that hair might have blown in from anywhere during the storm the day before, and he lived on the same street as where quite a lot of robberies had taken place. But when he told his fellow felons that they laughed, said they were sympathetic, but a man ought to be man enough to cough up when he was caught.

Red handed. That’s what they called it: red handed. Or red haired.

Gobbo had red hair. That was also looked upon as a factor that contributed to his guilt.

They had tacked a few more unsolved robberies onto his name for good measure, and it all proved what an evil, thoughtless, greedy b*****d he was.

At the end of his sentence he was set free into the world, his name besmirched but free at last.

They gave him his bas fair home and a bit to tide him over, and he found his way back to where he’d called home.

A home that, in his absence, had been repossessed by the Landlord who insisted he needed rent paid in full on a regular basis and jailbirds couldn’t do that.

He tried to get help from all sorts of places, the social security people, even charities, but he was always at the end of a queue and had to wait. For weeks.

To cut a long story short, and to forget the number of old friends he’d begged help from and been turned down because, well, they had families and thieves were bad influences even if they did have a good University degree and despite the fact that they did still swear their innocence. But in the real world innocent are never found to be guilty, are they? Not by proper justice. Not by a judge.

And remember, here’s no smoke without fire. Not ever.

And no fire without matches either, and matches need to be struck. By the guilty.

At first, when he found sleep stealing over him as he walked along, going nowhere from nowhere, he curled up on park benches or in dark places where the night could soothe his spirit as he slept, never comfortable, never anything but aching when the dawn rose in the skies and the sun looked blood red like his slowly rising anger.

Then winter started to shorten the days and lengthen the nights.

And it got cold. So cold he knew he’d never felt that cold before.

One morning someone, he didn’t know who, gave him an old blanket. He said he’d been on his way to the tip but it looked like Gobbo had more need of the threadbare thing than did the corporation dump. It was nice, that blanket, and it smelled of piss.

He didn’t mind that. It kept him warm.

But winter ate deeper into him, and a body weakened by the cold can’t so easily fight off the germs that escaped from other folks’ epidemics. So he became ill.

And the black snow flakes started falling all around him.

He suddenly knew what had gone wrong with his world. It hadn’t been the wrong accusation on the strength of a single hair. It hadn’t been the wrongful imprisonment by a court that couldn’t be bothered to understand or dig deeper towards the truth. It hadn’t even been the rejection by those he thought of as friends.

No, it was the way compassion had melted away from the world. Right away, and recently, it seemed.

People became outcasts. He’d become an outcast, with his honours degree and all the reading he’d done. And there was no compassion for outcasts.

And that was what he was thinking when he died, aged twenty-eight. That and how coal-black the snow flakes were before they touched him with their icy kisses.

© Peter Rogerson 20.12.17